Areas of interest
The Institute of Design (ID) is a graduate school of design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. We are dedicated to humanizing technology and improving the process of innovation, by developing and teaching a more methodological and human-centered approach to design. While most new products and services today are created in response to technology, marketing, or design trends, leading to a dizzying array of consumer choices that complicate our lives, we believe that real innovation starts with users' needs and employs a set of reliable methods, theories and tools to create solutions to their problems.
Our Interests
Here are a few of the areas and problems we focus on. Note that these are not degree programs or official areas of study, but broad interests that cut across everything we do.
As a newer profession, with its roots in arts and crafts, design has not historically had a body of fundamental theories and frameworks to underly and support its practice. Unlike other professions li...more
A primary role of design is to bring technology into a human context and provide interface mechanisms between technological artifacts and human users. Much of our work encompasses interaction design, ...more
Organizations routinely use prototypes to embody and test ideas that they hope to develop into successful products and services. Traditionally, prototyping activities have been focused on physical pro...more
A surprisingly frequent lament among C-level executives at global companies goes something like, "My company knows how to make anything; we just don't know what to make." As businesses have bec...more
Understanding users is a prerequisite for developing valuable, and valued, design concepts. From creating a research plan, to finding participants, and choosing and executing research methods in the c...more
Visualizing complex information is one of our main areas of interest in communication design. It is also highly relevant for research, planning, and product design activities as an approach to dealing...more
